Horticulture Tycoon

Why, because Elaine said it? That's not the same thing as the game saying it. Guybrush's parents also said that Guybrush is a little boy who ran away and so they sent his brother Chucky to go and find him. It doesn't make either statement definitively true. Obviously CMI resolved this ambiguity once and for all, but we're not talking about CMI. If it's all imagination land, then Elaine is imaginary and therefore her statement about a curse is meaningless. If it's a curse, then the parents are imaginary and what they say is meaningless. Either can be true.

You're the one who didn't like Half-Life, right gdf? Forever condemned it is! Here's why this is good news, people (and by people I mean OssK): There is an outside chance, if these games (plus the SOMI remake) sell well, we might actually get a new LucasArts adventure game! Maybe even one that's not a cancelled sequel to Full Throttle! Granted, all the talent from the golden age has left, but I'm beginning to get the impression from the info coming out about the Monkey Island Special Edition that there's a whole new wave of young talent there at LucasArts just dying to be allowed to make an adventure game. I don't think it's entirely out of the realm of possibility, not anymore.

What people say in interviews is irrelevant. All that matters is what is in the body of the game, and in the game it's obviously left to be deliberately ambiguous. Maybe it's all a boy's imagination, maybe it's a spell. To say that either case is demonstrably true would be a very presumptuous in my opinion.

Oh, if only...

Where in that message does it say the mystery thing is a game? Maybe they're releasing a compendium of old concept art or something.

Okay, the 360 is back and I've finally had a chance to sink my teeth into Ghostbusters. I'm really enjoying it, though it's the most on-rails game I've played in a long time. My biggest complaint is that you spend too much time fighting creatures that aren't ghosts and therefore don't need to be trapped (which is by far the most fun part of the game), and as a result it sometimes tends to feel like any other 3rd-person shooter. Also the camera angle, while it's very cinematic and aesthetically pleasing, gives you such a narrow field of vision that you're always being hit by things from behind you and of to the side. That said, busting ghosts is so much fun I'm more than happy to overlook its flaws and just go with it. I just wish there was more actual ghost busting and less shooting goblins in the face.

I think your dad is a parakeet I once had.

It should also have other buttons that play recordings of Jake saying something fucking weird. Also welcome!

Actually out of curiosity, I just looked up some old LucasArts games on Amazon, which apparently still has many of them in stock. But holy shit... $75 for Curse of Monkey Island? $162 for for Day of the Tentacle? They can't possibly be that rare, can they?

Since the thumbs aren't working, I think this is an appropriate substitute:

Closest to being a Ghostbuster that most of us will get? Is Eurogamer hedging its bets in case some of its readers become real-life Ghostbusters? I just picked up the game today, and if Microsoft's repair tracking is any indication, I should have an opportunity to play it by the end of the week. I'm encouraged by the fact that everyone's saying it gets the property right, since really that's all I'm buying the game for anyway. The Ghostbusters-obsessed six-year-old in me isn't going to care if the gameplay is old hat or the pacing is off, I just wanna come home from work and pretend to be a Ghostbuster for a while.

I assume with the Cheeseplate link, you meant to link to instead of ?

"It's sickening, but great." - IGN.com Real again.

Indeed we will:

That's actually my biggest concern about Natal in general. "Whoops, I'm trying to scratch an itch on my knee and the game thinks I'm throwing my F1 racer into neutral..." If you watch her at 2:42 it looks like she actually waits for the ripples to appear before she commits to putting her hands in. This whole video is very

I'm sure it's been said before, but I just can't help but imagine what this video would've been like if they'd used a middle-aged man in place of that woman, or even Molyneux himself. "Hello there, son. I see that you and I are here together, all alone... Why don't we do some drawing? You'd make a lovely subject. Why don't you take off your shirt?" Indeed, the fish will think you're a monster.

I hope that's the case, because right now I'm pretty annoyed. Even Egon is upset about it...

Indeed: first it stopped being able to play from the disc (the game would just freeze mid-game), but fortunately it was still able to install games to the hard drive just fine, so I could still play that way. For about three weeks I was playing everything exclusively from the hard drive, and things were going just fine until one day last week it actually froze in the 360 menu. I restarted the system, and it was ringapalooza. The 360 is about 13 months old or so, I bought it the same day GTA 4 came out.

I'm glad this thread went off the rails so quickly, now I don't need to vent about how my 360 red-ringed a week prior to my most anticipated game in years was released. The absence of bustin' is making me feel not so good.

Seeing as it was mentioned on the podcast as a minor obsession of Chris's, I should probably report on Moon, which I just got back from seeing. Since the movie's (meager) advertising goes out of its way not to reveal even the premise of the movie, it's hard to give an opinion without spoiling anything. Suffice it to say, an enthusiastic . It has its problems, if anything it's too cerebral for its own good -- at times the movie seems to be deliberately choosing to go the most intellectually interesting direction, at the expense of what is most narratively interesting. Still, it's nice to see a sci-fi movie about ideas for a change, and not about a series of explosions. If it comes to your town, definitely go see it. Unfortunately, I don't think it'll have much of a theatical run (if any, overseas) since on opening night in Chicago, second showing of the day, there were a grand total of five people in the audience.

Monkey Kombat forced me to write shit down because I couldn't remember what stance beat what other stance, or whatever. Prior to that, no game had forced me to write things down since about 1986. For that reason alone, I hate Monkey Kombat. (Also I hated the Monkey Kombat music. Also it was a funny Mortal Kombat parody the first time you did it, but the game made you sit through the same joke about a hundred times. Also that talking monkey who teaches it to you was annoying and unfunny. Also I hate that the end of the game consists entirely of Monkey Kombat, and yet after training you to fight one certain way, the game gives you no hint that you need to change your strategy, forcing me to sit through literally a half-hour of Monkey Kombat stalemate action!™ before finally figuring out what to do. Also fuck you Monkey Kombat.)

Why is there an elephant and a giraffe on the game's scoreboard? And why do I find their presence somehow more baffling than the game itself?

Well really when you think about it, nouns are the easiest thing to translate in any language. It's not as if they needed to learn how to speak fluently or conjugate a verb, you just feed your list of nouns into Babelfish and you're 95% finished right there.

Man, you guys in England/France et al. had some seriously interesting and creative childrens' books growing up. I'm jealous -- this was the kind of shit I read as a kid:

I'll make it simple: The reason they had LeChuck morphing between his three forms in EMI is because they couldn't think of a fourth. No, Charles L. Charles doesn't count.